


Standing On the Edge of Nothing

by USSDammit



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Bones-Centric, Gen, Kinda Fluffy, M/M, Medical Jargon, background Spirk, ish, kinda angsty, really just Bones getting freaked out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:50:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5094758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/USSDammit/pseuds/USSDammit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Jim.”</p><p> The name is more air than substance in the face of Leonard’s shock. He feels the need to stop. To just shut down, and permanently hole up in his quarters with a bottle of Saurian brandy, never to face the outside world again.</p><p>How many times do I have to watch you die before I follow you, kid?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing On the Edge of Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I have no idea how the heck this is going to go, but I've been wanting to post this for a while, so here it is. Oh god.  
> \- USSDammit

“Doctor McCoy, I need you to-.”

“Not now Chapel, I’ve got medical reports coming out of my ass and I just-.”

“Leonard.”

Bones looks up from the PADD on his desk. Chapel only ever calls him ‘Leonard’ off-duty, so unless he’s been sitting at his desk writing reports for all of Alpha shift, something’s up.

“It’s the Captain,” Chapel says, the barest tremor evident in her voice, “he’s hurt.”

“Well when isn’t he hurt? Damn fool sprained his ankle falling outta the dang Captain’s chair last week,” Leonard grumbles.  
He rises from his chair and moves toward where Chapel stands at the door. He can see her expression is almost… fearful. This from a woman who can plunge headlong into an open abdomen or tie off a severed artery without flinching.

“Christine… what’s wrong with Jim?” he asks carefully, as if stalking a frightened deer only seconds away from bolting.  
She takes a shaky breath, steeling herself against something, and looks him in the eye. McCoy can see something resembling pity in her gaze, but before he can truly register it, it’s gone.

“I-“ she begins.

“McCoy!”

Bones jumps at the panic distorting the usually calm and measured voice, and the bottom promptly drops out of his stomach. Because he knows that voice; he knows the Vulcan who controls it. And he knows that this particular Vulcan never raises his voice, not unless it has something to do with a certain best friend of the Doctor’s. Most pertinently though, Spock never, ever, panics.

Something is very wrong.

“Spock!” Leonard yells, rushing out into his medical bay as fast as the Chief Medical Officer’s legs can carry him.

Spock is bracing a thrashing man against a biobed, and McCoy can clearly see the blood streaming out of a nasty wound on the man’s temple. The desperate expression on Spock’s face, oddly alien against his usually placid features, cuts him to the bone, and the glimpse of command-gold on the seizing man’s torso almost makes his knees buckle.

“Jim.” The name is more air than substance in the face of Leonard’s shock. He feels the need to stop. To just shut down, and permanently hole up in his quarters with a bottle of Saurian brandy, never to face the outside world again.

_How many times do I have to watch you die before I follow you, kid?_

But he pushes the helplessness down and away. Leonard McCoy is a surgeon, dammit. He can look past the blood and gore to see what needs to be done to bring someone back from the brink of oblivion. In the midst of horror and inexplicable chaos, he is the rock in the surging river; calm, focused, unshakeable.  
So he ignores the all-too-familiar blue eyes of his best friend currently rolling back into his head. He deliberately forgets the fact that Spock would die without Jim, and he slams his own panic and sickening fear behind a steel wall of professionalism. Bones closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath.

And Doctor McCoy moves.  
* * *

“Stardate 2261.34, Chief Medical Officer’s log. Patient entered sickbay with a grievous temporal laceration, which was deep enough to damage the corresponding temporal lobe. There was profuse bleeding, patient was seizing upon arrival and left pupil was blown. Wound was successfully closed and bleeding stopped in surgery, and a repair was conducted to correct a major herniation in the affected region. Patient is currently in recovery, and although it is certain he will wake up, it is not guaranteed that he-.”  
McCoy’s voice breaks, and with shaking hands he ends the log.

Jim crashed 3 times in surgery. McCoy can remember the waves of shock and ultimate denial pushing him to fight impossibly harder to put a blip on the flat line holding his friend in limbo. He did it. Jim’s alive. But Bones still can’t seem to breathe.

He has to tell Spock, because it’s his right to know. As Jim’s bondmate, it’s his right to know. But, contrary to the belief of everyone aboard the Enterprise, including Jim, McCoy sees the Vulcan as a friend; so he doesn’t want to tell him that which he is sure will irreparably damage the already fragile man. If anything, he wants to bundle it up so far inside of himself that it will never see the light of day. Maybe if no one but him knows, if he doesn’t say it aloud, then it will never come to pass.  
Bones clenches his hands into fists in his lap in an attempt to still them. Sighing heavily, shoulders curling inward, he attempts to expel the dread currently crushing his heart like a vice.

It doesn’t work.

“Jim,” he whispers, a broken rendition of the same name that left his lips upon the arrival of the man in his sickbay. This time it is not a shocked breath of pain, it is a submission to the thundering tide of grief. Tears form at the corner of Bones’ eyes, and for the first time since losing Joanna to his wife, he lets them fall unhindered.

There is no sobbing- no uncontrollable rage, simply tears and overwhelming pain pressing down on the already far too heavy shoulders of a devastated man.  
Jim could be gone. Even if he wakes up, it might not be Jim behind the eyes of his best friend. The head wound and blood loss may have permanently damaged his brain, even though McCoy had fought harder than he thought he could and more. What if it wasn’t enough?

Finally, Bones feels the tears stop. The pain is still there, gradually eating away at the space where he knows his heart should be, but he can control it now. He can keep it inside long enough to tell Spock.

_Come on McCoy, you’re still a doctor. This is just another loved one you’ve gotta break some bad news to._

Wiping the last of the glistening tears from his face, he forces himself upright and schools his expression into one of neutral professionalism.  
He knows where Spock is. The damn hobgoblin hasn’t moved from Jim’s bedside since he got into recovery, which was two days ago, so there’s no reason to think he’s moved at all.

Taking a deep breath, McCoy allows himself a grimace at the prospect of the looming conversation, and then he goes to find Spock.  
* * *  
McCoy’s earlier suspicions are confirmed as he walks into sickbay and sees Spock sitting rigidly by Jim’s biobed, gently clasping his beloved’s hand. He walks over with every intention of being completely professional. Standing on the opposite side of Jim’s biobed, he waits for Spock to look him in the eye, but when Spock’s eyes draw level with his, all of his professional resolve is blown away by the onslaught of burning pain radiating from the Vulcan’s normally controlled gaze.

Bones slowly lowers himself into the chair behind him, all the while watching his friend’s eyes across the bed. Spock’s expression is neutral, all the panic and desperation of two days ago having bled away in the face of Jim’s unconscious vigil, but still his eyes burn as he clutches his bondmate’s hand like a lifeline in a storm. Almost as if he’s trying to pull Jim back, McCoy thinks to himself, bracing against the urge to take Jim’s other hand in his own and start hauling.

Instead, he begins to open his mouth; initiating what will probably be the hardest conversation of his life, when he is cut off by the subtly broken shards of Spock’s voice.

“Doctor-.”

“Spock, come on, after all this, after-,” McCoy stops himself before his voice can break under the strain of his best friend’s name, and starts again. “We’re friends, Spock. It’s just Leonard.” He expects Spock to disagree, but he doesn’t.

“Leonard. I am aware of the reason for your presence, beyond seeing Jim, and I wish to inform you that I am already cognizant of the consequences of the wound which Jim has received. Therefore there is no need for you to inconvenience yourself by attempting to disclose to me facts of which I am already aware.”  
Although the words themselves are directed at Bones, Spock’s eyes never leave Jim’s sleeping face.

“Oh…” says McCoy quietly, unsure how to respond to the statement.

Spock _knows._ He doesn’t have to tell him, because Spock already knows that Jim might be gone. That he may never come back from the edge of nothing.  
The two men make eye contact over the one who holds them together, in every sense of the word, and an understanding passes between them. As long as Jim is still here, neither of them will move.

Bones gives in and takes Jim’s hand in both of his, feeling the warmth emanating from it that reassures him more than the beeping of the heart monitor that Jim is still alive.  
They linger for hours, always on the precipice of crumbling into thousands of grief-scorched pieces; the only thing keeping them from receding into numbness as black as the surrounding space, is the hope they both refuse to relinquish.  
* * *  
A shift. The tiniest movement; this is what pulls Leonard McCoy from his nightmares of frozen blue eyes and deafeningly silent glass tombs.

He sits bolt upright, a small part of him registering that he must have fallen asleep holding Jim’s hand, and sees Spock leaning over Jim’s prone form.  
Following the line of the Vulcan’s gaze, Bones’ eyes land on the sleep-roughened countenance of James Kirk, looking at Spock through the eyes of a blind man seeing the Vulcan sun for the first time. His heart simultaneously tries to lodge itself in his throat and sink through the floor. Steeling himself against the hope flooding his limbs, he forces his body to rise from the chair and whispers, “Jim?”

Kirk’s eyes immediately fixate on Bones’ face, and now he’s pretty sure his heart is trying to strangle him. Because he can see the clever, cocky, genuine gleam in Jim’s familiar blue eyes.

_Calm down McCoy, you’re a doctor, you know how this works. Ask the damn question._

Aloud, he asks in a calm, neutral voice, “Jim, do you know where you are?” He can see Jim trying to speak; a look of intense concentration comes over his slightly paled features as he tries to form the words, and for a second McCoy thinks he won’t do it.

And then he does.

And it’s the greatest thing McCoy has ever heard.

“Yeah Bones, I’m in sickbay for the fifty-billionth time,” he slurs, his usually strong tenor thick with sleep. But his eyes are bright, clear and crinkling at the corners with a beaming smile. Spock exhales in a gust, the tension and worry that had been palpable just minutes before leaving in a rush, and of course immediately follows Jim’s statement with an admonishment. “Jim, t’hy’la, you are fully aware that the likelihood of one person incurring injury “fifty-billion” times is highly improbable, even if the individual in question is as unusually accident prone as yourself.”

Jim’s grin widens into a smile at the statement; and the love and relief Spock sends flooding through their telepathic bond only serves to widen it even more.  
McCoy unabashedly smiles, a rarity which anyone aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise will attest to, and interjects, “You know kid, I dunno why you keep the pointy-eared dictionary around. Doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the corrections.”

“Hey!” Jim grins, the last traces of sleep falling from his voice. “First off, he’s MY point-eared dictionary, and B, he’s all warm and cuddly and Vulcan-y, and third, he is GREAT in the-.”

“I don’t wanna know!” yells Bones as he desperately covers his ears and attempts to shield his mind against some very disturbing mental images. And Jim starts laughing, loud and long. Joy rings through the weakened walls of McCoy’s battered heart, rebuilding them after they so nearly collapsed.

The corner of Spock’s mouth twitches upward in the Vulcan imitation of a smile, and Jim can feels the amusement at Bones’ distress hum along their bond. His laughter redoubles, his sides beginning to ache slightly, but in the best way possible.

Bones listens to the strong, clear laughter of his best friend and watches the last of the pain drain from Spock’s body; he takes a deep, deep breath.

And, finally, Leonard McCoy begins to heal.


End file.
